I can understand zoom into the cockpit (maybe usefull to see instruments with more detail). But zoom using external camera is a complete deformation of the entire world, and that is something very nasty that I suppose nobody desire.
If I use mouse wheel by accident in external camera (it may happen, as I fly with my left hand on the joystick and the right hand all the time on the mouse to move my view), I soon correct the nasty effect.
This external camera management error gets worse when the plane places the pilot in the tip of the plane, because the external view rotates around the head of the pilot (not the plane). So the deformation of the plane is big because camera is too close to the tail, and the only way to separate the camera from the plane is introducing the zoom DEFORMATION of the world.
I think this is A BIG problem in this simulator, unless, of course, you are always inside the cocpit and don’t care about external view (that is not my case, I fly more time using external view).
Why is this external camera zoom problem happening?
I guess it is becuase devs created the zoom feature thinking on watching the instruments inside the cockpit in detail, and they just run into a problem when moving to the external camera. Probably they just let this problem be as it is. I can not think on another reason, I can not imagine anybody taking advantage of this deformation of the world when flying in external camera.